Drive-By Truckers have never been shy about politics. Their songs have long been about the small-town duality of the South: pride and shame, memory and myth, family history and the uneasy ghosts of history at large.

But American Band isn’t just a political record in the way their earlier albums circled around the edges of ideology. It’s a record that looks at the whole country straight on, post-Ferguson, post-Trayvon, post-Obama. This isn’t the DBT that gave us “The Southern Thing,” a complicated meditation on heritage off their third album Southern Rock Opera. This is a band that’s angry, unsettled, and determined to document America’s fracture in real time.

“Compelled but not defeated, surrender under protest if you must.”

That urgency is wired into the band’s DNA. Patterson Hood and

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